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Rating: Clearly these are sticky pages. You touch them, feel them, and get entangled. The world is a pale light in an unknowable recess of memory, a latent hum in the background; but sooner or later, you’ll have to come out and return to it. You know this. For now, the best you can do is climb the edges, swim in the ends of paragraphs, hop schizophrenically between the signifier and the signified. The black and white of the characters. You think the world can well wait for you a moment, with the excuse that you might need to tie your shoe. And take a long time doing it.
Now it is night. As usual, the outer frame of the traveling self was fog. But you need a night frame to enjoy this. It irritates you not to know, you tremble to know, you cling to the word—too dark to read, try to turn on the bedside lamp without losing your place. Can you make it? There. Lucky you have long arms. Now you can get involved in the proustian anxiety of this man in search of a woman. The cloying aura of the perfumery envelops him—you with him, torn away by the smell of printed paper, which rather than vanishing completely mingles with so many distinctly French fragrances that you feel nauseous. They offer him a scent, another, and another. Is the gentleman looking for a particular perfume? No. No. No. A woman. But why does it now seem to you that things, the frame, the essence, and the aftertaste have changed? Not to mention the setting, decidedly less chic.
Follow this man, who surely has more muscles than you. You think rightly, he has hairy and Pleistocene muscles. He too is looking for a woman among many, along with the upright stance. Yes, but apart from that, what’s the point? The smell is entirely different, sharp, prehistoric. Follow him anyway; you never know that continuing might lead you to unexpected twists. But you can no longer choose. You're there, with your nose smeared in mammoth.
And now? Well, the underlying smell isn’t so different, still sharp, but it smells of plastic, beer, and amplifiers, in addition. There's always a female presence, found by chance in the chaos of rock 'n' roll. See what happens; ah, back to the dandy. But now you no longer know which story you wanted to follow. A moment of patience. The fate, after all, is shared.
Olivia is a biting and carnivorous woman. Now you are floundering in the esoteric triumph of Aztec flavors; all implying a journey among the stones, pre-Columbian gold, the legends of the world, and the dry blood of the sacrificed, long ago. Things that apparently don’t interest you: it is in the taste that everything is drowned. In the rarefied air of the Mexican convent, the dishes are sprinkled with colors, but that isn’t the essential. It is the taste that predominates. Even the names of those foods make you want to bite them and gobble them up and assimilate them. How many words remain on the tip of our tongue, usually, while we say them? Not these, not with this fullness. With that bloody, horrible, and sublime aftertaste.
(The world is calling you back. You become aware of the hum. Hang up the phone. Turn off the cell phone. Turn off the computer too, which keeps chirping shrilly with snippets of instant messaging. Free yourself and disconnect from the world, once and for all. For God's sake, you might as well be free to concentrate on listening to something more intriguing than what you usually hear.)
Bravo, you guessed it. It's precisely your hearing that you need: you are the king of an empty and labyrinthine palace, full of echoes. The rest of the cosmos has faded away again, this time completely. You taste solitude by tapping with your fingers on the seat (how cold it is). You listen. You record. You stay. The palace subplots distress and bind you. Spies and conspirators, an air of upheaval, or maybe it's just your paranoia. You cannot move. You are a prisoner of your introspection. You are the poorest of men. The only door that can lead you outside passes through your eardrums. See what you can do to save yourself from this anxiety of living.
Well, this must be the end. What a shame. Don’t you feel like knowing a little more? Surely this book was written in the same period as the other. The one you always loved. The one that began with you, and a wanderer in the sea of fog. Well, not bad either. Not bad definitely. But what did you know, you were in the bookstore, you picked it up and that was it. How did you know it's the first book by Calvino published posthumously? How did you know—you didn't even read the introduction, go back to it now, if ever—that it was to be part of a series of stories dedicated to the five senses, but the poor guy only managed to do three. And how he did them, though. Well, now what do you do? Maybe you go back to the computer. Reconnect with the world, yes—it’s advisable. Or not. Didn’t you have another one on the side, that was on the list for a while and...? Maybe tomorrow you go back to the bookstore. Tonight you’re not sleepy.
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